Researching by Day, Writing at Night: My 50 Years As Author and Publisher

28 MICHAEL CANNON Researching by day, writing at night: my 50 years as author and publisher IN 1963, I was working like a demon researching the Melbourne land boom of the 1880s. Peter Ryan, recently appointed director of Melbourne University Press (MUP), introduced me to Hugh Brain, chairman of the T & G Assurance Co. Ltd. Brain had been closely associated with the WL Baillieu business interests and, for some reason, seemed anxious to tell me what he knew. He also allowed me to photograph an extraordinary list that the National Bank of Australasia produced in 1895 for confidential circulation to its branch managers, showing many secret insolvencies of prominent Melburnians that did not appear in the official records. All this gave me a personal insight into the characters who had manipulated the land boom and its aftermath. On the front verandah of our little house in East Brighton, Melbourne, I hammered out about 200,000 words for a book that I named The Land Boomers. My wife and I discussed many details of the book while pushing our twin babies in a wide pram around the historic streets of Brighton, and trying to visualise life in its boom-time mansions. As well as journalist and author Cyril Pearl’s constant wise advice, other assistance came from the artist Horace Brodzky, son of Maurice Brodzky, the editor of the old Table Talk; and Melbourne trade union solicitor Spencer Brodney (née Brodzky). For the chapter on GD Meudell, author of the suppressed Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift, the retired manager of Robertson & Mullens booksellers, Frank Campbell, was anxious to reveal all. The scars of My 50 years as author and publisher 29 the great land boom and bust had lasted for 70 years, and it was time the full story was told. I did not see any hope of getting the manuscript published in the rigidly stratified, conservative Melbourne of the time, and prepared to buy a small printing machine to produce a version for private distribution. However, Peter Ryan asked to see the bulky typescript, and passed it on to historian Geoffrey Blainey for an opinion. Geoff thought that it should be published, on literary and historical grounds, provided it was cut by about half. I spent several months typing out a new, shorter version, which was then worked on by an experienced MUP editor, Beryl Hill. On the basis of her tactful explanation of the meaning of editorial style, footnotes and bibliography, I revised the manuscript yet again. This became the shortened version that the press published in 1966 as a clothbound edition of 4000 copies selling at $7.50 each. Before publication, Peter Ryan sold serial rights of The Land Boomers to the Financial Review in Sydney. A few days later, he received an apologetic letter from the paper’s editor, Vic Carroll, saying that the Fairfax solicitors had banned publication in their newspapers because of the provisions of the New South Wales Defamation Act relating to possible damage to descendants. MUP’s Sydney representative, Colonel Alex Sheppard, encountered similar concerns among local booksellers, who were wary of displaying the book. Eventually Sir Frank Packer’s Bulletin magazine accepted whatever risk was involved and serialised parts of the book over three weeks in November 1966. Melbourne booksellers, not inhibited by the draconian New South Wales libel laws, went wild over the book, which sold out in seven days. After generally ecstatic reviews appeared in most papers (with the notable exception of the Melbourne Herald), copies were changing hands at up to $50 each. The comments that pleased me most were those of Professor Walter Murdoch in two successive articles that he wrote for his nephew Rupert’s Australian newspaper. Murdoch had wished to train as a doctor, but was prevented when his widowed mother lost her savings with the crash of the Commercial Bank in 1893. He found my book ‘admirable and horrifying’. Some families of people who had made fortunes out of land speculation were not so impressed. Darren Baillieu, a surviving son of WL Baillieu, wanted to cancel the family’s regular donation to the Baillieu Library at Melbourne University. I was informed on good authority that his brother Clive (Lord Baillieu) told him not to be so petty. But Frank Strahan, university archivist, told me that the Baillieu family had reneged on its promise to finance a new archives building, refusing to increase its funding to a university whose press could publish such inflammatory material. 30 The La Trobe Journal No. 97 March 2016 Many editions and versions of the book followed. Today I am not so sure that it is good for a writer to enjoy such an instantaneous success with a first book. The heady success of a bestseller leads people to expect that you can do the same again, and expands your ego to the point where you begin to agree with them. A note of caution also came from the knowledgeable Professor Weston Bate who claimed in Historical Studies that my general account of the late-Victorian age was ‘oversimplified and often grossly inaccurate’. Uneasily aware of my lack of deep historical knowledge, I did not reply, but tucked the judgement away and thought, ‘One day I’ll show you buggers’. I used free time to begin another intensive research program at the La Trobe Library [now the La Trobe Collection, State Library Victoria] skimming through almost every 19th-century Australian book, newspaper and journal it could offer. A wealth of neglected material lay before me. The first fruit of this activity was the rediscovery of the eccentric journalist John Stanley James, who disguised his identity to get jobs in various institutions during the 1870s and 1880s, thereby obtaining the information to write scarifying ‘inside’ articles for Melbourne’s Age and Argus. I condensed his collected Vagabond Papers into one volume, discovered his true identity, and wrote a long biographical introduction for the MUP edition of 1969. The boom in Australian books seemed to be continuing. With the assistance of Patricia Reynolds, then the La Trobe Librarian at the State Library, I decided to publish a facsimile edition of the Australasian Sketcher, a monthly, illustrated journal published by the Melbourne Argus in the 1870s and 1880s. I selected the year 1880, mainly because the bushranger Ned Kelly was hanged that year and the woodcuts of his final battles and execution were superb. Pat loaned me one of the Library’s precious rare volumes, which I took to Graham Enticott, who ran a lithographic film company near the library. He agreed to photograph the pages carefully onto process film, as long as I held the volume open and flat under the arc lights. Dai Nippon in Hong Kong printed the huge volume beautifully on heavy art paper, and I sold copies mainly by mail order. For as long as the Aussie dollar held up, and offshore print costs remained reasonably low, it seemed like money for jam. I followed the Sketcher with about a dozen other facsimile reprints of scarce and valuable books. My biggest venture in this field was to reprint Garryowen’s (Edmund Finn) two-volume Chronicles of Early Melbourne, with an additional biographical volume that included a comprehensive index by suburban bookseller Neil Swift. Most of these books sold well for the duration of the boom in Australiana before everybody got into the act. My 50 years as author and publisher 31 During 1971 I was finally able to abandon the frenetic and frustrating world of newspapers for the more satisfying work of writing and publishing books. As part of deeper research into historical sources, I had already extracted many passages from Age editorials of the gold rush era of the 1850s. I selected them not so much for their long-term significance, but for the power and passion of the writing. The best were collected into a book that I called The Australian Thunderer, bestowing on the Age a cachet it sometimes deserves today. This little book was published through my firm, Heritage Publications, and sold out its 1000 copies at $3.60 each, leaving me with a modest profit. If published commercially, the retail price would probably have been nearer to $10. Meanwhile I was working up my other research into a general survey of the 19th century, which I rather grandiloquently called ‘Australia in the Victorian Age’. My method of working was quick and wide-ranging. Photocopying and microfilming were coming into general use, and were comparatively cheap. As I rapidly traversed holdings of the major libraries in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, I ran their copying departments ragged by ordering thousands of copies of the passages and illustrations that caught my eye. The criterion that I used for selection was simple: anything with dramatic or human content throwing light on the development of Australia was meat for the pot. I studied the material more carefully at home, where firm outlines of chapters almost subconsciously took shape. In the end, while I was able to discard 90 per cent of what I had garnered, all of it helped me to build up a general picture of the nation’s pioneering years, which was perhaps slightly distorted by my preference for the revealing anecdote. But most lives are fairly boring in their daily routine: it is only the highlights, the ironies and the tragedies that are remembered. Around 1972 I applied to the Commonwealth Literary Fund, which was at that time chaired by the former conservative prime minister Robert Menzies, to finance me through some of the extensive research and writing required.

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